In Heaven Everything is Fine

In Heaven Everything is Fine

Katerina Iliopoulou

In Heaven Everything is Fine

A small room
A window looking at the sea
The bare landscape, the geological unfoldings
Each day countless times you sketch them with your eyes
The body follows them
And one small window opposite the bed
Black hills at night
And crickets

We came here to be alone
But we aren’t
We aren’t alone
There are rooms hewn out of the rock
There’s a city
When we lie there for hours
In the stone cradles
We adapt our body to theirs
Inside the dens of salt
We let their hands burn our palms
We wear the heavy cloak of their breathing in the heat

It’s summer you think that
There will never be clouds again or green grass
Little flowers of the rocks.
Trapped in a children’s drawing
Yellow and blue
Thickly painted everywhere
And we two dots
In a prehistoric room
On these rocks we burn with them
Like immortals
One on top of the other
One for the other
One inside the other
One against the other
The small stone temple in the center
An eye completely exposed
From there you can truly weep
Looking up at the sky

You are so alone when you sleep
You are never alone when you sleep
Never beyond the reach of my hand
Your body lies
And words
A thread
Which we draw from each other’s mouths
Erecting a building one can pass through.
Thus when we’re together
We find ourselves at once inside and outside the world
Words are survival
In the midst of multiplicity
As if the future existed

Simulation of Paradise
Even the greatest euphoria
Leaves us naked
Annihilated
Lost
“Not more sky and stars,
Please, let’s put on the light so I can read”

Katerina Iliopoulou is a poet, artist, and translator living in Athens, Greece. Her poetry has been translated in many languages and has been featured in literary reviews and anthologies in Greece and abroad. Her poetry books are Mister T., Asylum, and The book of soil. She has translated the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Robert Hass, Mina Loy, and others, and is co-editor of the bilingual site www.greekpoetrynow.com.